EVE General Discussion

I go the other way. With ANY wis, it means they are basically supporting 2 completely separate games with the associated costs of doing so, one of which they have basically no experience with as a company and make basically zero dollars off of. Remove the space barbie that's there altogether. It's basically un salvageable.

I want Ambulation, not incarnia. CCP's first attempt at walking in stations was actually pretty great, but they scrapped it.

As said above, there is not much of a business reason right now for WiS, so its most likely not going to happen. But still i wish it would

If I recall correctly, most of WiS was done up in the previous graphics engine before Carbon, and would need much effort to bring it forward to today's standards. Read up on the "Summer of Rage" and you'll get an idea why this is... unlikely.

If you're really curious to see what might have been, there's a Fanfest 2008 presentation by Torfi Olafsson (currently Creative Director for CCP, but at the time he was the Senior Producer) on YouTube: Walking in Stations

Here's some interesting time markers:

Leaving the captain's quarters and heading for the promenade: 33:30 "The Door" really was intended to open.
Shops in installable sockets: 37:00
The bar & bartender: 38:40
The dancer: 40:30
Minigames (Table games) including "SecWars": 43:25
(This would have been an opportunity to have actual in-game betting between players, controlled by the gaming engine)

Those two things were definitely part of it, and then we had these "gems" as well:

- Graphic card meltdowns
- Crashing clients
- Crashing servers and serious downtime
- Users with relatively new machines/graphic cards being told: "Those don't meet our new minimum standards, upgrade."
(Hooboy, I'll be that was real popular at the time.)

Any one or two of these issues would have been difficult, but manageable. All of them together? 50% of the customer base revolted and left. Painful, but at least CCP got a wake up call that they needed. We got the Hilmar apology+promise to listen and do better, the customer base that was left responded positively, and that's pretty much the point you could see that WiS's goose was cooked and it was extremely unlikely that it would ever see development resources again. Pity about that, as the video I linked showed, there were some interesting ideas in there. Ah well, water under the bridge at this point.

A lot of people still enjoy EVE. In order to continue doing so, CCP must successfully strike a balance between core product development and their R&D on their side projects. Here's hoping they do.

The Incarna Expansion of 2011 failed to deliver the WiS (Walking In Stations) that was promised years ago in 2006 known as Ambulation. The Incarna Expansion basically became the catalyst which, when combined with resulting events after deployment and previous in-game problems, ended up being 'The straw that broke the Camel's back' prompting player outrage and mass un-subs which quickly became known as 'The Summer Of Rage'..

Despite what some players may say, WiS was not the reason for 'The Summer Of Rage'. There's a lot of other issues that contributed to it which I've listed here in no particular order.

1. CCP ignoring 'The 1001 Papercuts' thread - large list of broken game mechanics and unfinished content since 2003.
2. Numerous expansions constantly being rushed out half finished, untested and bugged breaking existing content.
3. CCP introducing NEX Store and MT - selling overpriced items for real money bypassing player market and production.
4. Threat of 'Gold Ammo' and 'Gold Ships' enabling 'Pay to Win' exploitation.
5. CCP dividing their development resources to work on 3 different projects at the same time.
6. The 'Fearless Newsletter' leaked memo - Greed is good.
7. CCP statement of Eve Online being viewed as the Golden Goose.
8. 3rd party Developers being demanded to pay real money to CCP for providing free Eve Online applications to players.
9. CCP failure to keep and maintain their promise of 'Commitment to Excellence'.
10. Showing players 'The Door' and removing player option of choice, forcing player participation in Captains Quarters.
11. CCP attempting to diffuse the situation with excessive thread locking and banned accounts.
12. Lack of communication from CCP resulting in poor Public Relations due to ignoring the player base.
13. CCP releasing poorly written un-optimized code in the Incarna Expansion resulting in various client side issues.
14. Hilmar's statement - "Watch what they do, not what they say."

Basically Hilmar's statement became the rally cry for the mass un-subs. Those un-subs combined with a large loan payment being due resulted in CCP downsizing their company and placing the other projects on the back burner in order to refocus resources on fixing various issues in Eve.

A couple of expansions after Incarna (mostly 'Fix-it' patches), CCP once again tried revisiting WIS / Avatar Ambulation intending to incorporate it into exploration. Even though there were a lot of ideas presented to CCP to turn it into meaningful game content, the player base got into a rage war and couldn't agree on the basic game mechanics governing Avatar game content. Since 'The Summer Of Rage' was still a sore subject, CCP ended up dropping the project ..... again. In my opinion I believe CCP became 'Gun Shy' and didn't want another episode of Incarna events to happen.

Anyway, hopefully CCP will revisit WIS / Avatar Ambulation in the future. I don't expect it to be anytime soon, at the very least it'll be a few years from now, probably be even longer.


DMC

lol, I was just gonna say it's #6 on the list which is set up in no particular order.


DMC

The mistake people make is that they see CCP as one entity, which it isn't. Through time you can distinguish 4 versions of CCP with different devs, motives and goals.

> 1999 - 2007ish: CCP of old with Oveur and people who dared to be different, didn't do the carebear PC thing and who were very talented and creative. They made EVE, this is the CCP we remember and loved

> 2007-2011: a CCP who doesn't care for EVE itself, they just want more subs so they can do other things. They were caretakers at best with horrible ideas. The one notable thing from that era is Apocrypha which was mostly done by an ex-player, in a remarkably short development time. The rest is all terrible and ultimately resulted in Incarnage, the summer of rage. This CCP was incapable of creating anything decent

>2011-2014: the "oh crap" CCP where they realised that ignoring your customers and the goose that lays the golden eggs you buy your cocaine with isn't really good business sense. Lots of stuff got done but realistically it was CCP catching up and making up for lost dev time. They started working on Valkyrie but most of it had to be redone later anyway

2014- now: the Seagull era, more than a caretaker and dares to change stuff that cause short term problems but offers long term solutions. I might not always agree with the decisions as such but it's obvious this CCP has a vision and puts in lots of effort to make EVE a better game. This CCP might be able to create something new and get away with it

Yeah, sounds like average gamedev for me. Though again, as I was saying, graphics don't need to be good at first, they can improve on them later. As for the code side, well since they've got that demo that someone else showed up in this thread, they could probably reuse that code with little modification to get the WIS up & running.

Though about walking thing, they'd really need to add running and jumping, otherwise moving around stations would suck. I don't expect AssCreed-like parkour (would be fun though if they'd manage to do that, especially if they introduce ground combat), but just ability to run and jump over smaller obstacles.

So yeah, it would be quite easy to adapt that old code and add WIS. Probably would take a month or two (dunno if their netcode and client/server internals changed between then and now and if so by how much), but compared to the things they have to do just to keep game running, it's peanuts.